What we know about Sony's Playstation 4 rollout

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting news of Sony’s PlayStation 4, this is shaping up to be a good week for you.

We’ve known about the $400 price tag for the PS4 since June’s E3 gaming expo. (And that’s after Sony first announced the next-generation gaming console back in February.) On Tuesday at the Gamescom event in Germany, Sony had even more to say: namely, it announced that the PS4 will hit North America on November 15 in the U.S. and Canada and November 29 in all other territories.

In this video report, we’ll look back at Sony’s Tuesday press conference. We also know the 32 territories that will be getting the PS 4 on November 29. They include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Peru, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Japan is missing from that list, an odd omission considering it’s Sony’s home territory. It’s no surprise when Microsoft delays the Xbox One’s launch in Japan, but no mention of PS4 plans for Japan is certainly unexpected. Perhaps, Sony is saving that news until the Tokyo Game Show in September.

Our video looks at other announcements from Sony’s press event at Gamescom including a whole slew of new games, Twitch.tv support for the PS4 that supplements the previously announced partnership with Ustream, a first look at the console’s user interface, and trailers for big-budget fare such as Watch_Dogs, Assassin’s Creed IV, Gran Turismo 6, Infamous: Second Son, and Killzone: Shadow Fall. We also talk about how Sony’s November 19 date may affect plans to launch the Xbox One, which arrives November 13 with a $500 price tag.

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Facebook readies roll-out of mobile payment system for e-commerce

Over the next month, Facebook is expected to roll-out a mobile payment system that will allow users to make purchases with just their Facebook login on partnering e-commerce mobile apps.

According to a report from AllThingsD, the first partner using the new system will be dude-centric online clothier JackThreads. The payment system would utilize stored credit cards that Facebook already has in its system, which users have been using within the site forincreased promotion, in-game purchases, and gifts.

If pushed beyond the limited test phase, the new payment system would place Facebook squarely in competition with established players like PayPal, any number of new startups in the space, and perhaps eventually even the credit card networks themselves.

The new payment initiative follows an announcement in early June when Facebook announced that it would phase out its Credits system of payments for all games. The social network aims to convert to local currencies by September 12, instead of using what was basically a virtual incarnation of amusement park “fun bucks.”

The move to real money, which was announced in 2012, was set in place to give more flexibility to developers from around the world dealing with international currencies. However, Facebook may have had grander plans to move into mobile payments across the board—and with good reason.

The mobile payments game is a skyrocketing business that is expected to hit $1 trillion (that’s with a “tr”) by 2015. Facebook would certainly like to get a piece of that action, but these types of mobile payments may also provide Zuckerberg & Co with something nearly as enticing—lots of data. The online payments would add another level of data that Facebook could use for its ballooning graph search function, which the company hopes will make its service as valuable (and ubiquitous) to consumers as a Google search. If you click through to the Facebook gifts page, you can already find a list of which of your friends is be-gifting who.

Facebook has yet to make an official announcement on the initiative, and we have reached out to JackThreads for comment; we’ll update you with any additional details.

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Evan lives in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys writing about what future may hold and taking long romantic walks on the beach.
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Sprint promises wide rollout and device support for ex-Clearwire spectrum

Sprint says it will have live LTE sites using former Clearwire spectrum across the U.S. next year and expects all its new mobile devices in 2014 to be equipped for those frequencies -- though not necessarily iPhones.

The company gave an update on progress in its Network Vision upgrade project during a conference call on Tuesday to discuss second-quarter financial results, according to a transcript provided by Seeking Alpha. Earlier this month, the fourth-largest U.S. mobile operator got a shot in the arm with its US$21.6 billion acquisition by SoftBank and also bought out former partner Clearwire.

With the Clearwire acquisition, Sprint got access to an emerging Clearwire LTE network that it plans to use for extra mobile data capacity in densely populated areas. Though it uses a slightly different form of LTE than Sprint's and operates in a relatively short-range spectrum band, around 2.5GHz, the former Clearwire network could give the carrier a large amount of capacity to bolster services in cities.

The network had been intended for Sprint's use through the longstanding partnership between the two companies, but Sprint's takeover of Clearwire gave that plan a more solid foundation.

There were already about 2,000 Clearwire LTE sites completed when the buyout was completed earlier this month, said Steve Elfman, president of network operations and wholesale, on the conference call. He expects several thousand 2.5GHz LTE base stations on the air this year, with sites across the country next year, though not the full deployment of sites that will use the spectrum. The 2.5GHz radios don't have as long a range as Sprint's other gear, so they'll be deployed in a larger number of sites, he said.

Sprint plans eventually to operate LTE in three spectrum bands: Its own 1.9GHz band, the 800MHz frequencies from its defunct Nextel network, and the 2.5GHz spectrum. Earlier this month it introduced the first mobile device that will be able to use all those bands.

The carrier expects to have a few handsets with 2.5GHz capability in the fourth quarter, and starting in 2014, all its new devices will be able to use that spectrum, Elfman said. But asked later on the call whether that would include the Apple iPhone, Elfman clarified that Sprint couldn't say whether Apple would adopt 2.5GHz for that device.

"We can't confirm anything on the iPhone at this time or anytime," Elfman said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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